Call Me By Your Name

by André Aciman

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember.

Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.

“You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was.”

Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

The places where he’d lived also felt inanimate, and as soon as I tried thinking of them, they too would float and drift away, no less unreal and spectral.